Cultural Competence

~ Clarissa

Another direction of the unfortunate Europeanisation of Anheuser-Busch was the kind of music events that it sponsored. Companies sponsor cultural and sporting events in order to promote their wares to attendees. Anheuser-Busch sponsored a lot of country music festivals where people are likely to know and appreciate the Budweiser beer brand.

But the Belgian CEOs of the newly acquired Anheuser-Busch didn’t like or understand American country music. They started canceling these sponsorships and instead invested into techno music festivals. In Belgium, this is something that works for beer companies but in the US it doesn’t. Enormous amounts of money were redirected from advertisement that works to the advertisement that doesn’t.

It’s really funny that the social class which invented the expression “cultural competence” doesn’t believe that America deserves a culturally competent approach. Its representatives want to be in America but they don’t accept the possibility that America has culture.

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Published by Clarissa

6 thoughts on “Cultural Competence”

    1. OMG, dude, this was going to be my first book. Back in 2007, this is what I was writing! I swear, I still have the files with the drafts.

      Then I grew up, thank God. Wow, I can’t believe that book did end up getting published although thankfully not by me. 😁😁😁

      The review of the Anheuser-Busch book is coming up very soon.

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  2. Another direction of the unfortunate Europeanisation of Anheuser-Busch was the kind of music events that it sponsored.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_purge

    In the early ’70s, the networks—especially CBS—deliberately wiped out popular rural and working-class shows. The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, even Hee Haw—all hugely successful, all canceled. Not because people stopped watching, but because advertisers wanted “younger, urban, upscale” audiences. Rural, middle-American viewers were suddenly treated as the wrong demographic. It was an early, very explicit moment when cultural gatekeepers decided who mattered and who didn’t—and it’s hard not to see it as a precursor to everything that followed.

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      1. LOL, actually Kid, Gillette’s arsekissing toxic maculinity ad in 2019 produced a loss of $5 billion in quarterly sales, resulting in P&G giving Gillette an $8 billion non-cash writedown in terms of valuation. It takes a “special” kind of stupid even for a feminist to imagine that insulting your target group was a good idea ;-D

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    2. “The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, even Hee Haw“

      To be fair, the Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction had pretty much run their course… and had lost most of what made the shows popular in the first place. Green Acres was different, still funny in its meta-surrealistic way. Hee-Haw didn’t disappear but went into syndication where it thrived for many years.

      But the switch from rural eccentrics to hard-bitten big city neurotics was very clear at that time. All in the Family was the leader there but the Odd Couple and some others weren’t far behind.

      Also interesting in this light was the late 70s Dukes of Hazzard, a show put into a death slot that did predictably awful in big cities but went through the roof in most of the country.

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